Tag: Greece

In the midst of bitter bailout negotiations between Greece and Europe, warnings proliferated of a possible Greek Fifth Column. The European Union and even NATO would collapse should Athens turn toward Russia. It is one of the stranger paranoid fantasies driving U.S. foreign policy.

For five years Athens has been arguing with its European neighbors over debts and reform. The issue doesn’t much concern the U.S. A European economic crisis would be bad for America, but Grexit is not likely to set off such a cataclysm.

Nevertheless, some analysts speculated that Athens might fall out of the European Union and NATO as well as the Eurozone, resulting in geopolitical catastrophe. Thus, the U.S. should insist that Europe pay off Greece. Despite an apparent bailout agreement, another crisis seems inevitable, in which case the specter of a Greek Trojan Horse likely will reemerge.

This fear betrays an overactive imagination. “You do not want Europe to have to deal with a Greece that is a member of NATO but which all of a sudden hates the West and is cozying up to Russia,” warned Sebastian Mallaby of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Nearly a month ago Greek voters rejected more economic austerity as a condition of another European bailout. Today Athens is implementing an even more severe austerity program.

Few expect Greece to pay back the hundreds of billions of dollars it owes. Which means another economic crisis is inevitable, with possible Greek exit (“Grexit”) from the Eurozone.

Blame for the ongoing crisis is widely shared. Greece has created one of Europe’s most sclerotic economies. The Eurocrats, an elite including politicians, journalists, businessmen, and academics, determined to create a United States of Europe irrespective of the wishes of European peoples.

European leaders welcomed Athens into the Eurozone in 2001 even though everyone knew the Greek authorities were lying about the health of their economy. Economics was secondary.

Greece could have simply defaulted on its debts. However, Paris and Berlin, in particular, wanted to rescue their improvident banks which held Athens’ debt.

Thus, in return for tough loan conditions most of the Greek debt was shifted onto European taxpayers through two bail-outs costing roughly $265 billion. Greece’s economy has suffered, and the leftwing coalition party Syriza won Greece’s January election. Impasse resulted at the end of June as the second bailout expired.

This weekend’s news was dominated by the sorry tale of Greece, where a referendum on whether to accept the terms of a new European Union bailout failed by a landslide. Now Greece’s Eurozone creditors face the uneasy choice between offering a more generous bailout plan, or accepting a Greek departure from the Euro.

Sunday’s referendum was just the latest debacle in the five-year tug-of-war between Greece and other Eurozone members. The ruling Syriza party has been openly hostile to the austerity-focused conditions of EU bailout loans – which run counter to their left-leaning economic agenda – as well as to the EU negotiation process itself. The spur-of-the-moment referendum was itself largely a surreal PR stunt: the deal voters were evaluating had in fact been withdrawn by the EU prior to Sunday’s vote.

Unfortunately, the situation in Greece is untenable. Banks remain shut, and ATM users can withdraw only 60 euros a day. The country defaulted on its IMF loans last week, the first advanced industrialized economy to ever do so. An emergency summit of Eurozone leaders is convening on Tuesday to hear new Greek proposals, but it is unclear whether German leaders in particular can be convinced to accept a more generous bailout deal. Failing that, Greece will begin its Eurozone exit, creating turmoil in international markets.

But as I wrote over at CNN.com, “Grexit” would result in more than just financial problems. Greece’s exit from the Eurozone is likely to draw it closer to Russia, with security implications for other EU and NATO member states.

Given its current economic problems, Russia cannot afford to bail Greece out entirely. But it could certainly provide funding for sizable infrastructure projects.

In the short-term, Grexit would certainly be a boon to Russian propagandists:

“allowing anchors on Russian state TV to highlight further evidence of the decline of the European Union and of Western civilization more broadly.”

And in the longer-term, a Russia-friendly Greek government could even act as a spoiler within the EU and within NATO, including a veto over any extension of sanctions on Russia.

Until this point, the White House has largely avoided commenting on the Greek crisis, other than reassurances that U.S. banks are largely insulated. But as Eurozone leaders make the final choice on Greece’s future, U.S. leaders would do well to consider how a Grexit could impact U.S. security aims in Europe.

You can read the whole piece on the security implications of the Greek crisis here.

It’s hard to find anything written or spoken about Greece that doesn’t contain a great deal of hand wringing about the alleged austerity – brutal fiscal austerity – that the Greek government has been forced to endure at the hands of the so-called troika. This is Alice in Wonderland economics. It supports my 95% rule: 95% of what you read about economics and finance is either wrong or irrelevant.

The following chart contains the facts courtesy of Eurostat. The central government in Greece is clearly bloated relative to the average European Union country. The comparison is even starker if you only consider the 16 countries that joined the EU after the Maastricht Treaty was signed in 1992. To bring the government in Athens into line with Europe, a serious diet would be necessary – much more serious than anything prescribed by the troika.

Banks in Greece will not open their doors Monday morning. Greece has been moving towards this dramatic final act ever since it was allowed to enter the Eurozone with cooked fiscal accounts in January 2001 – two years after the euro was launched. One Greek government after another embraced the idea that it did not have to rein in fiscal expenditures to match revenues because Brussels would cover any shortfalls. That idea appeared to have worked, until other members of the Eurozone realized that the entire European project would fall apart if it became a transfer union.

This realization was brought into sharp focus by the bailout demands of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and his left-wing coalition government. Brussels finally realized that if the demands of the Tsipras government (read: Europeans must pay for Athens’ largesse) were met, the Eurozone would morph into a giant moral hazard zone. So, Brussels was forced to throw down the gauntlet: enough is enough.

Where does Athens go from here? Well, to quote former President George W. Bush, as he observed the unfolding financial crisis in 2008: “If money doesn’t loosen up, this sucker could go down.” Well, “W” had a point. Changes in the money supply, broadly determined, cause changes in nominal national income and the price level.

Since October 2008, until the Syriza party took power, the broad measure of the Greek money supply (M3) contracted at an annual rate of just over 6%. And as night follows day, the economy collapsed, shrinking by over 25% since the crisis of 2008.

Since the Tsipras government took the helm, the monetary contraction in Greece has accelerated. This means that a Greek depression of even greater magnitude is already baked in the cake.

And that’s not all. It is going to get worse. The total money supply (M3) can be broken down into its state money and bank money components. State money is the high-powered money (the so-called monetary base) that is produced by central banks. Bank money is produced by commercial banks through deposit creation. Contrary to what most people think, bank money is much more important than state money. In Greece, for example, bank money makes up just over 84% of the total money (M3) supply.

With banks so wounded, Greece is destined to become a financial zombie state.

Negotiations in Brussels to resolve the Greek fiscal crisis appear deadlocked, with Athens heading toward default. German Chancellor Angela Merkel insisted that Greece make a deal before the markets open Monday. The Eurogroup will meet again tomorrow on the issue.

The European Union was supposed to create a de facto United States of Europe. But after last January’s Greek election it was obvious that the EU does not speak for Greece, or perhaps anyone else other than the Eurocrats, an amalgam of bureaucrats, academics, journalists, businessmen, politicians, and lobbyists who dominate Brussels.

To most EU leaders common people are an impediment. The Eurocrats reflexively intone “more Europe” in answer to every question, but voters increasingly are supporting protest parties, some populist, some worse.

Under normal conditions, the IMF is supposed to be limited to lending up to 200% of a country’s quota (each country’s capital contribution made to the IMF) in a single year and 600% in cumulative total. However, under the IMF’s “exceptional access” policy there are, in principle, virtually no limits on lending. The exceptional access policy, which was introduced in 2003, opened the door for Greece to talk its way into IMF credits worth an astounding 1,860% of Greece’s quota – a number worthy of an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records.

The IMF’s over-the-top largesse towards Greece explains why the IMF has been forced to play hardball with Greece’s left-wing Syriza government. The IMF’s imprudent over-commitment of funds to Greece leaves it no choice but to pull the plug on Athens. That is why the IMF’s negotiators packed their bags last week and returned to Washington, and that is why it will probably remain uncharacteristically immovable.